Huddersfield Contemporary Music festival (HCMF) is "the ninth largest festival of its type in the world," says Garbutt, "and it attracts people from all over the world." As you might imagine, this is neither the most popular nor accessible form of music, but it does attract musicians and composers of the highest calibre.
From a presentation point of view, this is challenging stuff, and while lighting demands tend to the minimal, audio is a complex matter, to say the least. TG Events looks after all aspects of production for the festival, contracting local company Innovations for the lighting; Andrew Pygott, owner and LD in residence, says: "Muchof what we do is wait-and-see: the content is unknown and we have to provide something simple - just generic looks."
That said, he put a nice display into the Festival Hub, a café and information centre for festival-goers based in a de Boer tent in the city centre. Typically, Pygott uses MAC 250 and 600s, ETC Source Four profiles and Selecon 1200s. "I also have some 2.5kW City Colors [Studio Due] and have just bought a 6.6kW Xenon Dominator, a large-format moonflower effect, which I used for the Festival of Light that precedes the music festival." Pygott was also the lucky recipient of a new demo Jands Vista console, courtesy of A.C. Lighting North, but had not had the chance to fully explore its potential when we visited.
All sound equipment comes from The Warehouse in Glasgow: Ian Gibson (now an employee of The Warehouse) has worked the festival since '96 (this is the 27th HCMF). "It's also about the equipment they have," said Garbutt of the Warehouse contract. "Many, many of the musicians and performers come from the European mainland, and virtually all of them specify d&b."
Gibson had some useful advice regarding equipment specifications from foreign and obscure performers: "Getting the information in advance can be difficult. Take the Oslo Sinfonietta, for example: they require a full surround sound PA, quite a commonplace occurrence with this style of music, but requiring attention to detail. Although we tend to deal direct with them for clarity, it's important to make sure that TG Events is included; as producer they need to have the full picture. The great blessing has been email, but it has made people sloppier - they tend to leave things to the last minute. My golden rule is everything has to be agreed in print - no phone calls to change a mic spec' - it has to be confirmed by email."
And what of the musical demands? "Well, they want little in the way of effects - that will come from the musicians; fidelity is the be-all and end-all - I think that's why they tend to spec' d&b. It's the same with the Edinburgh festival which we [The Warehouse] also do; it's the way it's engineered as a system - you can take any part of d&b's range and mix it with any other, the new digital controller amps make that even easier."
The performance by the Oslo Sinfonietta is a good example. Sound engineer Cato Langnes has a Soundcraft MH4 to feed his audio mix to a variety of speaker positions around St Paul's, a stone built Victorian former church, that sits in the grounds of Huddersfield University. "It's a quasi-quad system made up of C6s, C7 Tops and Subs," said Gibson. "There's a couple of Maxes in there as well . . . these composers write the spatialization effects into their scores - and they can be very subtle." Fortunately, all tend to bring their own signal routing controllers: "It's all very high end, but it's a small world, so they tend to use the same things."
Capture is another thing: "We use a whole variety of mics, anything from a Shure 57 to an AKG se300 co
